Explained (2018–…): Season 3, Episode 14 - Fairy Tales - full transcript

[fanfare music playing]

[narrator] Once upon a time,

there was a beautiful, downtrodden girl
with an evil stepmother.

Then a fairy godmother
granted her wish to go to a ball,

-where, at the stroke of midnight…
-[clock chimes]

…she lost her glass slipper.

-But a prince found it…
-Huh.

[narrator] …and when
he finally tracked her down,

they fell in love
and lived happily ever after.

You know the story.

Or maybe you know this story.



There was a beautiful, downtrodden girl
with an evil stepmother.

Then some magical fish bones

granted her a wish
to go to the New Year's festival,

where she lost her teeny tiny golden shoe.

-But the king found it…
-Hmm.

…and when he finally tracked her down,

they fell in love
and lived happily ever after.

-And her evil stepmother…
-[growls]

…was crushed to death by stones in a cave.

And in Greece,
a similar story was once told.

Except this beautiful, downtrodden girl
was bathing in a river,

when an eagle swooped in
and stole her sandal,

which it then serendipitously
dropped right into the lap of a king.

Spoiler alert:
When he finally tracked her down,



they fell in love,
and they lived happily ever after.

And there are plenty more.

Downtrodden girl.

Magical intervention.

Loses her shoe, meets her love.

Girl, magic, shoe, love.

Back in 1893,

a folklorist recorded
345 different versions of Cinderella

told all around the world.

Today, we think that number
is in the thousands,

and it's not just Cinderella.

Many of the fairy tales you know and love
exist in dozens of different countries.

Why do we keep
telling versions of the same story?

What is it about fairy tales?

Ready? Let's go.

[man 1] Between these covers,
we find these immortal favorites.

[man 2] Do you remember
when you were small

hearing the story of Red Riding Hood?

Remember, when the clock strikes 12:00,

you must be home by then.

[man 3] Remember the lovely princess
who was bewitched into a deep slumber

until her Prince Charming
came to break the spell?

Come on, wake up! Wake up!
You lazy good-for-nothing!

Come on, wake up!

When we talk about fairy tales,
often we use the term

to think about things
that are unrealistically good.

[Negga] You know the image,

reproduced in so many movies,
TV shows, advertisements.

[Grady] And the camera sort of freezes
on this impossibly beautiful moment.

And often we're hearkening
specifically to the idea

of the ending of a Disney movie.

[Negga] In 1937, Walt Disney,

animator extraordinaire,

co-inventor of Mickey Mouse,

released Snow White, the rollicking story

of a beautiful girl, her evil stepmother,

and seven adorable dwarfs
of varying temperaments.

What?

[Negga] It was his first ever
full-length animation movie

and made in Multiplane Technicolor,

as they boasted in the movie's marketing.

[man] More than 250,000 paintings
like these

were created by Walt Disney
and his staff of artists.

[Negga] Many copied frame by frame from
a recording of these reference actors,

so the characters looked and danced
like real people.

As opposed to,

well, cartoons.

Like these earlier Disney films.

Production was so ambitious
that newspapers labeled it his folly.

But when Snow White came out,
they changed their tune.

It became an international sensation.

You could buy Snow White accessories,
Snow White dolls,

a vast array of dwarf-inspired hats,

and the first movie soundtrack ever sold.

If you adjust for inflation,

Snow White still ranks among
the highest-grossing movies ever made.

And it created the playbook
for many Disney hits that followed.

[Grady] This fantasy of ball gowns,
and castles,

and a poor young girl
who has to find her happy ending,

probably by marrying a prince.

There's nothing wrong with any of that,

but it's doing a very different thing
from the earlier fairy tales.

[Negga] If you want to know
what fairy tales are really about,

you have to ask the true experts.

It's a thing

that, uh, might be on movies,

might be on books.

It needs a main character. It's magical.

Um…

A fairy tale is basically a story

which has

pretty characters
who say beautiful speeches.

A fairy tale is

not real.

It's just a story.

[in Spanish] That comes
from another world, a world of magic,

full of creativity, of many colors.

I mean, a completely different world
from the one we know.

[Negga in English] And those definitions
are pretty accurate.

It might make sense
to think of these stories

as tales about metamorphosis
and transformation.

[Negga] Cinderella's rags
turn into a beautiful dress.

Snow White comes back to life
with a true love's kiss.

Jack's beans sprout a plant tower
that stretches beyond the clouds.

All fairy tales
have mystery and magic in them.

[Negga] But so do a lot of stories
that aren't fairy tales,

so it might help to know
what a fairy tale isn't.

First, a fairy tale is not a legend.

Legends are all stories
with historical basis,

set in a real time, a real place.

A fairy tale setting should be ambiguous,

which is why they often start with
"Once upon a time."

Or in Czech,
"Beyond seven mountain ranges,

beyond seven rivers."

Or in Arabic,

"There was, oh, what there was,

or there wasn't, in the oldest
of days and ages and times."

A fairy tale is also not a myth.

Which is often a sacred story,
or a foundational story.

A charter narrative
about how a civilization began.

-[Negga] In other words a religious story.
-[hissing]

And lastly, a fairy tale is not a fable,

which are stories told specifically
to convey a moral or message,

often by way of a pair of talking animals.

Like The Hare and the Tortoise,

which shows us, you know,
slow and steady wins the race.

[tortoise] I am not afraid.

I'll race you, and I'll win.

[Negga] Fairy tales can have
a moral element,

but it's not always that clear what it is.

Jack and the Beanstalk
appears to be pro-stealing.

At least from ogres.

It's a simple story. It's skeletal.

The forces of good and evil.

Not much nuance in there at all.

[Negga] And they tend
to follow a similar arc.

The hero and their world is established,

then the villain enters
and does something villainous,

the hero comes up with a plan to fix it,
gets some magical help.

There's a struggle,
they escape, get rewarded. The end.

There are a lot of stories
that follow this arc.

And only a small subset

involve a pretty princess who's rescued
by a prince and then gets married.

Folklorists are Disney haters.

It's a corporate fairy tale.
It's top-down.

And in some ways, what it has done
is to give us a standardized version

that has erased
all of these local variants.

[Negga] Like all those Cinderellas.

Japan had its own Cinderella, Hachikazuki,

and her story was uniquely Japanese.

She's protected by a magic bowl
stuck to her head,

a Buddhist symbol.

But when Disney's version
of Cinderella came to Japan,

she became a cultural phenomenon,

featured in movies, books, accessories,

and the All-Star Dream Cinderella
wrestling tournament.

Or take the Russian version of Snow White,
preserved in this Soviet-era cartoon,

which has the famous magic mirror,

and the poisoned apple,

but the seven dwarfs are seven knights.

And their relationship
to Snow White is a little different.

[in Russian] As you know,
you're our sister.

All seven of us here are in love with you.

[Negga in English] But even before
Disney's Snow White conquered the world,

the tale it's based on
had pulled off a similar feat.

A somewhat darker German folktale,

Sneewittchen,
which Disney clearly nods to.

The dwarfs' house
is a classic medieval Germanic design.

So is the castle,
with its rounded towers and iron finials,

and Snow White's upturned collar,
and puffy, slashed sleeves.

That original German version
had become so famous

because of one of the great
marketing coups in literary history.

Turning fairy tales

into kids' stories.

[bouncy music plays]

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
were librarians and amateur folklorists

living in Prussia, now Germany,
in the early 1800s,

a period when Napoleon's empire
was rapidly expanding,

threatening, they thought,
to eclipse German heritage entirely.

So they traveled the country,
collecting folk stories.

[Tatar] They wanted to capture
the remnants of a storytelling tradition

before it disappeared.

Stories that had been told
by adults to other adults,

with children present at times.

[Negga] In 1812,

they published a book titled
Children and Household Tales,

because the tales were about children,

not for children.

Well, this is their version of Rapunzel.

There's a beautiful girl
with magical hair,

who's imprisoned in a tower
by an evil sorceress,

Mother Gothel.

One day, a prince climbs up her hair
to enjoy her company.

-Rapunzel gets pregnant and has twins…
-[babies crying]

…so Gothel banishes them
to the wilderness.

They got terrible reviews.

The book was panned.

[Negga] A leading critic called it
"pathetic and tasteless."

And they decided, "Okay,
we're gonna listen to these critics."

"We're gonna make
those stories more child-friendly."

[Negga] By their final edition,

the prince just chats to Rapunzel.

Nobody gets pregnant.

And then the prince's eyes
get poked out by thorns.

[groans]

Child-friendly in 19th-century Germany
meant more violence.

A book called Shock-Headed Peter

was a best seller at the time,

with stories like a boy
who sucks his thumb,

and gets it chopped off by giant scissors.

Or a boy
who doesn't want to comb his hair,

so he ends up looking like this,

and his parents stop loving him.

These were cautionary tales

warning them
about the dangers of curiosity.

Becoming a manual of manners for children.

[Negga] In the Grimms' version
of Cinderella,

the stepsisters
cut off chunks of their feet

to try to jam them into the slipper,

but they're thwarted by a pesky pigeon.

And it says, "Coo-coory coo,
there's blood in the shoe."

It's a rhyming couplet.
I don't actually remember it.

[Negga] It's actually…

Rook di goo, rook di goo!

There's blood in the shoe.

The shoe is too tight.

This bride is not right!

[Negga] Later, the birds come back,
and peck out their eyes.

I have this very clear memory
of being about three,

and just being, like, super into it,
and being like,

"Yes, this is what
these evil people deserve. Get 'em."

[Negga] As the book
spread internationally,

editors added illustrations.

[Tatar] That is a real inflection point.

They became part
of what we now call bedtime reading.

[Negga] Inspiring other writers,
like Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen,

to make up fairy tales of their own.

But in their prologue,
the Grimms made a pretty magical claim.

Their stories were ancient,

linked to the earlier
and simplest forms of life.

There had often been the assumption
that a lot of these stories were very old.

And that's because we find many
of the same stories in different cultures,

cultures that we know
are related to one another.

[Negga] More than a century
before the Grimms,

Charles Perrault had published
a hit book of fairy tales in France,

which included a lot of the same stories.

There had been earlier writers too,

and it was possible that
they had actually invented these stories,

and then they spread like wildfire.

A lot of these stories

may just simply be very catchy.

They may just be
really entertaining stories

that people love hearing and love telling,

so therefore may not be ancient
in origin at all.

[Negga] But solving that mystery

was next to impossible.

Take Little Red Riding Hood.

This map is a snapshot of all the times
a version of the story was written down.

By a missionary in West Africa,
a poet in China,

or two brothers in Germany.

But in between
all of those recorded stories

are thousands of miles
and hundreds of years.

Now, that's very similar to the problem
that evolutionary biologists have

in trying to reconstruct
the history of life,

because only a tiny fraction

of all the species that have ever existed
have left any trace at all.

[Negga] But by tracking
a certain trait or gene,

they're able to show how species evolved

and even prove
the existence of shared ancestors

that are long extinct.

And Tehrani took the same approach.

The core DNA
of Little Red Riding Hood is simple.

A child, or children,

is isolated from a parent,
then tricked by a predator,

who is pretending
to be a beloved relative.

But there are also lots of mutations.

In Europe, the predator is a wolf.

In China, it's a tiger.

In Africa, an ogre.

In some stories,
the child wears a red riding hood.

And in others, the child is a goat.

Sometimes, the child dies or…

A passing woodcutter comes
and cuts open the wolf's stomach

and rescues
Little Red Riding Hood from it.

[Negga] And other times…

She doesn't need a man to rescue her.

She figures out a way
to get away from the wolf herself.

[Negga] And based on all those variations,

Tehrani traced
how the story must have spread.

[Tehrani] You get a kind of family tree
of versions of Little Red Riding Hood.

[Negga] Fanning out into three continents,

and splitting off into smaller branches
as details were added or lost.

This tree tells its own story

of the places a tale traveled,

and of the generations of people
who shared and loved it,

and made it their own.

By tracing any branch back,

you can also see
which stories share an ancestor.

Like the Grimms' version.

Their proudly German tale

is a direct descendant
of Perrault's French one.

One of the Grimms' main sources
had actually been a family friend,

the daughter of French immigrants.

Who probably were familiar

with the version
that Perrault had first written down.

[Negga] But Perrault
definitely hadn't invented it.

The original Little Red Riding Hood
predates any famous book,

originating at least a thousand years ago.

But we're not sure from where or when.

[Tatar] We imagine human beings
gathered around campsites,

telling stories to each other.

One, to pass on ancestral wisdom,

and also for the sake of entertainment.

These stories have been passed down
from generation to generation

for a long, long time.

[Negga] Beauty and the Beast,
that's 4,000 years old.

Jack and the Beanstalk is 5,000.

And the oldest fairy tale they studied…

You find in Germany,
and in Western Europe,

and in Eastern Europe,
and in Western Asia,

lots of these different populations
that can be traced way back

to the last common ancestors.

[Negga] Six thousand years ago.

Five thousand five hundred years
before we invented printing.

Four thousand before we invented paper.

Two thousand
before we first wrote a story down,

the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It was first told right around the time
we figured out how to make bronze,

a civilization-changing event.

Which may be why the story
is The Smith and the Devil.

[Tehrani] The blacksmith makes a deal
with a malevolent, supernatural figure.

He wants to be able
to weld any materials together

to be the greatest blacksmith
that's ever lived.

And in return, he will give up his soul.

[Negga] If you haven't heard that story,
you've heard a version of it.

I had to be at that there crossroads
last midnight

to sell my soul to the devil.

I offered my soul to Satan,

if he would raise the Hessian
from the grave to avenge me.

Would you be willing to make a deal?

Name your price.

[Negga] In Christian societies,

it's become a story about
the dangers of ambition,

but in the original version…

[Tehrani] The first thing
the blacksmith does

is sticks the devil to the spot,
so the devil can't move.

So he gets to be
this kind of best blacksmith of all time

and also gets to keep his soul,
so he tricks the devil.

Fairy tales have been

beta tested for a really long time.

They are stories
that have just been honed down

to a series
of very evocative, specific details

over centuries and centuries of retelling.

[Negga]
It's story survival of the fittest.

As a story evolves,
it sheds anything superfluous.

That's why the characters and plots
are so simple,

which means they can be easily
adapted to the times.

There are so many evil stepmothers
because before the 20th century,

it was pretty common
for women to die in childbirth.

And Disney's Cinderella
got a pumpkin carriage

because when Charles Perrault
originally wrote that version down,

people were excited about pumpkins.

They were the cool new crop
brought over from the Americas.

Some of the earliest movies

by legendary illusionist Georges Méliès

were versions of Cinderella and Bluebeard.

The not-so-child-friendly story of a woman
who discovers that her new husband

has a habit of murdering his wives.

And then Lotte Reiniger
moved them into a whole new world,

cutting puppets
and choreographing their shadows,

producing the true
first full-length animated movie.

And this film,
a 1916 version of the Grimms' Snow White,

played to packed theaters

barely able to hold the crowds of people
desperate to see it.

Including, the story goes,

a young boy named Walt,

who was so enchanted by it
that he grew up to make his own version.

Disney has created
the one story that we all know.

And so, in that sense,

you could say that it's had
a kind of negative cultural effect.

But Disney kept the stories alive.

Were it not for Disney,

many of these fairy tales
might have disappeared.

Fairy tales are very much a product
of the time in which they are made.

If you look at Snow White,

that's a movie made in the '30s.

The feminine ideal at the time,

who is sweet and industrious, and cleans,

and is a sort of passive ideal
of womanhood and of femininity.

[Negga] Disney also famously only hired
white men in creative positions.

As the company
explained in this rejection letter,

quote, "Girls weren't even considered
for their training school."

But times have changed.

Frozen is the first Disney animated movie
to be directed by a woman.

[Tatar] Which was inspired
by Andersen's story of The Snow Queen,

but which becomes a kind of hymn

to the solidarity of sisters,

and the solidarity of women in general.

In many ways, when we rewrite
the fairy tales to be more feminist,

we're not really going forwards
so much as we are going back.

[Negga] The writer Madame d'Aulnoy

gave us the term "fairy tale"
back in the 17th century.

And in her version of Cinderella,
the beautiful, downtrodden girl

is nicknamed "Little Clever Girl,"

because she triumphs
by outsmarting her enemies

and making friends in high places
with the fairies.

[Grady] She spends the whole time
being nice to all of her enemies,

but the moral that you're given
at the end of this version is

it's really funny when you're nice
to people who are terrible,

and then you beat them anyway.

[Negga] As fairy tales moved on
from campfires into homes,

then onto pages and finally screens,

some stories faded into the shadows.

But today more than ever before,

we have access to different branches,

different trees,
different forests entirely.

The film Coco introduced millions
to Mexican folklore

about the importance
of remembering your ancestors.

Moana was based
on Polynesian folk traditions

that remind us to care
for our communities.

And Japan's Hayao Miyazaki

has given the world
tales about the horrors of violence,

and respect for the natural world.

A theme shared by the Celtic folklore

that inspired the film Wolfwalkers.

[Tatar] The great thing
about going global is

that we realize that there's
this golden chain of folklore

that unites all of us.

That is, these stories
can get us talking across continents,

across cultural divides,

across linguistic divides.

Fairy tales are stories that have survived
for thousands of years for a reason,

because they help us
think about these problems

that are fundamental
to the human experience.

The very best folktales

are the ones
that are both highly adaptable,

but also ones that really speak
to kind of fundamental truths,

fundamental concerns,
that are going to be relevant

to all humans everywhere
and at every time.

I learned that don't talk to strangers,

and always listen to your parents

or the family you know.

If I saw the wolf, I would
just keep walking, not talk to him,

go to grandmother's house,

and just eat, no stopping.

You don't always have to

wear something pretty

or look pretty

to be pretty from the inside.

If the person liked you,

or they wanted to be your friend,
they will like you for who you are.

[in Spanish] If we believe
and trust ourselves,

we can move forward, no matter what.

[Negga in English] And they lived
peacefully and prosperous.

Or happily and contentedly
until the end of their days.

Or in happiness and luxury
to this very day.

Or happily ever after.

Or snip, snap, snout,
and then the story was out.

[closing theme music playing]